To evacuate or not: An empirical analysis on the effectiveness of the Malaysian NSC'S directive 20 in flood disaster management

• Main Authors: Soon, Jan Jan, Kamaruddin, Roslina, Anuar, Abdul Rahim
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: GB Physical geography
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/19537/1/IMAC8%202016%20235%20238.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/19537/; http://conference.ukm.my/IMAC/imac8

Using a unique data set collected from victims of the now infamous 2014 massive flood in two east coast states of Malaysia, this paper tests several hypotheses concerning flood victims’ evacuation decision.Such evacuation decision can be regarded as a reflection of the effectiveness of the Malaysian NSC’s Directive 20.It is a directive on the policy and mechanism of the integrated disaster management system involving pre-disaster, during disaster, and post-disaster management. Preparedness is one aspect of pre-disaster management, which involves implementations of an early warning system, awareness programmes, and information dissemination such as where the evacuation centre would be located in the event of a flood, for example. Apart from a handful of reviews and conceptual studies on the Directive 20, there are yet to be any empirical studies the effectiveness of the directive, where preparedness is one aspect of itseffectiveness.One important aspect of preparedness is whether or not there are any periodic disaster management awareness programmes being held at the community level.Our results however show that such programmes are not significantly associated with evacuation decisions.This finding implies that such awareness programmes to be seemingly inconsequential as part of the government’s effort in educating the community to evacuate to safer grounds in the event of large-scale disaster.